Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

by James Tiptree Jr.

  “A moment, Lilli, a moment. I must caress you just once more.”

  “I’m afraid, Moggadeet! Cease now and bind me!”

  “But why, my lovekin? Why must I hide you? Is this not some foolish part of the Plan?”

  “I don’t know, I feel so strange. Moggadeet, I—I’m changing.”

  “You grow more glorious every moment, my Lilli, my own. Let me look at you! It is wrong to bind you away!”

  “No, Moggadeet! No!”

  But I would not listen, would I? Oh, foolish Moggadeet-who-thought-to-be-your-Mother. Great is the Plan!

  I did not listen, I did not bind you up. No! I ripped them away, the strong silk strands. Mad with love, I slashed them all at once, rushing from each limb to the next until all your glorious body lay exposed. At last—I saw you whole!

  Oh, Lilliloo, greatest of Mothers.

  It was not I who was your Mother. You were mine.

  Shining and bossed you lay, your armor newly grown, your mighty hunting limbs thicker than my head! What I had created. You! A Supermother, a Mother such as none have ever seen!

  Stupefied with delight, I gazed.

  And your huge hunting-limb came out and seized me.

  Great is the Plan. I felt only joy as your jaws took me.

  As I feel it now.

  And so we end, my Lilliloo, my redling, for your babies are swelling through your Mother-fur and your Moggadeet can speak no longer. I am nearly devoured. The cold grows, it grows, and your Mother-eyes are growing, glowing. Soon you will be alone with our children and the warm will come again.

  Will you remember, my heartmate? Will you remember and tell them?

  Tell them of the cold, Leelyloo. Tell them of our love.

  Tell them . . . the winters grow.

  ON THE LAST AFTERNOON

  “YOU’LL HAVE TO help us,” Mysha said painfully. “One last time. You can do it, can’t you?”

  The noion said nothing. It hung on its stalk as it had hung since he first found it here in the headland grove: a musty black indescribably shabby object or entity, giving no more sign of life than an abandoned termite nest. No one but he believed it was alive. It had not changed in the thirty years of the colony’s life, but he had known for some time that it was dying.

  So was he. That was not the point, now.

  He pulled himself up from the case of tapes and frowned out over the mild green sea, rubbing his wrecked thigh. The noion’s grove stood on a headland beside the long beach. To the left lay the colony’s main fields, jungle-rimmed. Below him on his right were the thatch roofs, the holy nest itself. Granary, kilns, cistern, tannery and workshops, the fish sheds. The dormitories, and the four individual huts, one his and Beth’s. At the center was the double heart: the nursery and the librarylabs: their future and their past.

  The man Mysha did not look there now, because he had never stopped looking at it. Every brick and beam and pipe and wire was mapped in his inner eye, every cunning device and shaky improvisation, every mark of plan or accident down to the last irreplaceable component from the ship whose skeleton rusted at the jungle’s edge behind him.

  Instead he gazed out, beyond the people laboring and splashing on the jetty in the bay, beyond the placid shoals that stretched to a horizon calm as milk. Listening.

  Faintly he heard it: a long sourceless whistle.

  They were out there. Out beyond the horizon, where the world-ocean crashed forever on the continent’s last reefs, the destroyers were gathering.

  “You can do it one last time,” he told the noion. “You must.”

  The noion was silent, as usual.

  Mysha made himself stop listening, turned to study the seawall being built below him. A cribbed jetty stretched from the headland, slanting out across the shoals to meet a line of piling coming from the far side of the colony beach. They formed a broad arrowhead pointing at the sea. Shelter for the colony.

  In the unfinished apex gap, brown bodies were straining and shouting among rafts piled with rock. Two pirogues wallowed, towing cribs. Another work-team splashed toward the pilings pulling a huge spliced beam.

  “They can’t finish in time,” Mysha muttered. “It won’t hold.” His eyes roved the defense-works, reviewing for the thousandth time the placing of the piles, the weak points. It should have been in deeper water. But there was no time, it was all too late. They wouldn’t believe him until the stuff had started washing ashore.

  “They don’t really believe yet,” he said. “They aren’t afraid.”

  He made a grimace of pride and agony, looking now at the near beach where boys and girls were binding logs with vineropes, assembling the cribs. Some of the girls were singing. One boy jostled another, who dropped his end of the log, tumbling them both. Hoots, laughter. “Get on with it, get on with it,” he groaned, pounding his broken thighs, watching old Tomas fussing them back to work. Tomas would outlive him if they survived, if any of them survived what was coming. He groaned again softly. His beloved ones, seed of his race on this alien world. Tall, unfearing, unscarred, as he had never been.

  “Man is an animal whose dreams come true and kill him,” he told the noion. “Add that to your definitions. . . . You could have warned me. You were here before. You knew. You knew I didn’t understand.”

  The noion continued silent. It was very alien. How could it grasp what this haven had meant to them, thirty years ago? This sudden great pale clearing at the last edge of the land, and they roaring down to death on the rocks and jungle in their crippled ship. At the last minute of their lives this place had opened under them and received them. He had led the survivors out to bleed thankfully into the churned sand.

  A tornado, they decided, must have swept it bare, this devastated square mile stretching to the sea. It had been recent; green tips were poking up, fed with fresh water from an underground flow. And the sand was fertile with organic mulm, and their wheats and grasses grew and the warm lagoon teamed with fish. An Eden it had been, those first two years. Until the water—

  “Are you not . . . mobile?” The noion had spoken in his head suddenly, interrupting his thought. As usual it had “spoken” when he was not looking at it. Also as usual, its speech had been a question.

  From long habit he understood what it meant. He sighed.

  “You don’t understand,” he told it. “Animals like me are nothing, in ourselves, without the accumulated work of other men. Our bodies can run away, yes. But if our colony here is destroyed, those who survive will be reduced to brutes using all their energy to eat and breed. The thing that makes us human will be lost. I speak with you as a rational being, knowing for example what the stars are, only because the work of dead men enables me to be a thinker.”

  In fact, he was not a thinker, his inmost mind commented sadly; he was a builder of drainage lines now.

  The noion emanated blankness. How could it understand, a creature of solitary life? Hanging forever on its limb, it was more impressed with his ability to move his body than with anything in his mind.

  “All right,” he said. “Try this. Man is a creature that stores time, very slowly and painfully. Each individual stores a little and dies leaving it to his young. Our colony here is a store of past time.” He tapped the box of tapes on which he rested.

  “If that generator down there is destroyed, no one can use the time-store in these. If the labs and shops go, the kilns, the looms, the irrigation lines and the grain, the survivors will be forced back to hunting roots and fruits to live from day to day. Everything beyond that will be lost. Naked savages huddling in the jungle,” he said bitterly. “A thousand generations to get back. You have to help us.”

  There was silence. Over the water the eerie whistling suddenly rose, faded again. Or did it fade?

  “You do not . . . ripen?” The noion’s “words” probed stealthily in his mind, pricked a sealed-off layer.

  “No!” He jerked around, glaring at it. “Never ask me that again! Never.” He panted, clenching his m
ind against the memory. The thing the noion had shown him, the terrible thing. No. No.

  “The only help I want from you is to protect them.” He built intensity, flung it at the noion. “One last time.”

  “Mysha!”

  He turned. A leathery little woman toiled up the rocks toward him, followed by a naked goddess. His wife and youngest daughter, bringing food.

  “Mysha, are you all right up here?”

  Bethel’s sad bird-eyes boring into his. Not looking at the noion. He took the gourd, the leaf-wrapped fish.

  “What I’m doing you can do anywhere,” he grumbled, and repenting touched her sparrow wrists. The glorious girl watched, standing on one leg to scratch the other. How had these supernatural children come out of Bethel’s little body?

  It was time to say some kind of good-bye.

  “Piet is coming to take you inland,” Bethel was saying. “As soon as they get the laser mounted. Here’s your medicine, you forgot it.”

  “No. I’m staying here. I’m going to try something.”

  He watched her freeze, her eyes at last flicking to the silent brown thing hanging from its branch, back again to him.

  “Don’t you remember? When we came here, this grove was the only untouched place. It saved itself, Bethel. I can make it help us again this time.”

  Her face was hard.

  “Beth, Beth, listen.” He shook her wrist. “Don’t pretend now. You know you believe me, that’s why you’re afraid.”

  The girl was moving away.

  “If you don’t believe me, why wouldn’t you let me love you here?” he whispered fiercely. “Melie!” he called. “Come here. You must hear this.”

  “We must go back, there isn’t time.” Bethel’s wrist jerked. He held it.

  “There’s time. They’re still whistling. Melie, this thing here, you’ve heard me call it the noion, it’s alive. It isn’t native to this planet. I don’t know what it is—a spore from space, a bionic computer even, maybe—who knows. It was here when we came. What you must know, you must believe is that it saved us. Twice. The first time was before any of you were born, the year when the wells went dry and we almost died.”

  The girl Melie nodded, looking composedly from him to the noion.

  “That was when you discovered the blackwater root,” she smiled.

  “I didn’t discover it, Melie. No matter what they tell you. The noion did it. I came up here—”

  He glanced away for an instant, seeing again the stinking mudflats where the lagoon was now, the dry wells, the jungle dying under the furnace that poured white fire on them week after parching week. That had been the year they decided it was safe to breed. Bethel’s first child had been lost then along with all the others, desiccated in the womb.

  “I came up here and it felt my need. It put an image in my mind, of the blackwater roots.”

  “It was your subconscious, Mysha! It was some memory!” Bethel said harshly. “Don’t corrupt the girl.”

  He shook his head tiredly. “No. No. Lies corrupt, not the truth. The second time, Melie. You know about the still-death. Why we don’t use the soap after the wheat has sprouted. When Piet was a baby. . . .”

  The still-death . . . his memory shivered. It had hit the babies first. Stopped them breathing, with no sign of distress. Martine’s baby started it, she’d seen the bubbles stop moving on its lips while it smiled at her. She got it breathing again, and again, and again, and then in the night Hugh’s baby died.

  After that they watched constantly, exhausted because it was harvest time and a smut had damaged the wheat, every grain had to be saved. And then the adults started to drop.

  Everybody had to stay together then, in pairs, one always watching the other, and still it got worse. The victims didn’t struggle, those who were brought back reported only a vague euphoria. There was no virus; the cultures were blank. They tried eliminating every food. They were living only on water and honey when Diera and her husband died together in the lab. After that they huddled in one room, still dying, and he had broken away and come up here—

  “You were in a highly abnormal state,” Bethel protested.

  “Yes. I was in a highly abnormal state.” On his knees here, cursing, his need raging at the noion. What is killing us? What can I do? Tell me! The broken gestalt of his ignorance clawing at the noion.

  “It was the need, you see. The urgency. It—somehow, it let me complete myself through it. I can’t describe it. But the fact remains I learned what to do.”

  Adrenaline, it had been, and febrifacients, and making them breathe their own carbon dioxide until they choked and choked again. He had come down from the hill and thrust his baby son’s head in a plastic bag with Bethel fighting him.

  “It was the enzyme in the soap,” said Melie calmly. She cocked her head, reciting. “The-soap-traces-potentiate-the-ergotin-the-wheat-smut-resulting-in-a-stable—uh—choline-like-molecule-which-passes-the-blood-brain-barrier-and-is-accepted-by-the-homeostats-of-the-midbrain.” She grinned. “I really don’t understand that. But, I mean, I guess it’s like jamming the regulator on our boiler. They didn’t know when they had to breathe.”

  “Right.” He held Bethel more gently, put his other arm around her thin rigidity. “Now, how could that have possibly come out of my mind?” The girl looked at him; he realized with despair that to her there were no limits on what he might know. Her father Mysha, the colony’s great man.

  “You must believe me, Melie. I didn’t know it. I couldn’t. The noion gave it to me. Your mother won’t admit it, for reasons of her own. But it did, and you should know the truth.”

  The girl transferred her gaze to the noion.

  “Does it speak to you, Father?”

  Bethel made a sound.

  “Yes. In a way. It took a long while. You have to want it to, to be very open. Your mother claims I’m talking to myself.”

  Bethel’s mouth was trembling. He had made her come here and try once, leaving her alone. Afterward the noion had asked him, “Did anyone speak?”

  “It’s a projection,” Bethel said stonily. “It’s a part of your mind. You won’t accept your own insights.”

  Suddenly the whole thing seemed unbearably trivial.

  “Maybe, maybe,” he sighed. “‘Bethink ye, my lords, that ye may be mistaken. . . .’ But know this. I intend to try to get its help once more, if the beasts break through. I believe it has the strength to do it just once more. It’s dying, you see.”

  “The third wish.” The girl said lightly. “Three wishes, it’s like the stories.”

  “You see?” Bethel burst out. “You see? It’s starting again. Magic! Oh, Mysha, after all we’ve been through—” Her voice broke with bitterness.

  “Your mother is afraid you’ll make a religion out of it. A fetish in a carved box.” His lips quirked. “But you wouldn’t believe a god in a box, would you, Melie?”

  “Don’t joke, Mysha, don’t joke.”

  He held her, feeling nothing. “All right. Back to work. But don’t bother trying to move me, tell Piet to use the time for another load. You have the lab packed, haven’t you? If they get through there won’t be any time.”

  She nodded dumbly. He tightened his arms, trying to summon feeling.

  “Dying makes one cantankerous.” It was not much of a good-bye.

  He watched them going down the hill, the girl’s peach-bloom buttocks gliding against each other. The ghost of lust stirred in him. How solemn they had been, the elaborate decisions about incest. . . . That would all go too, if the sea-wall failed.

  Figures were swarming over the water tower now, mounting the old wrecking laser from the ship. That was Gregor’s idea; he’d carried all the young men with him, even Piet. True, the laser was powerful enough to strike beyond the wall—but what would they aim at? Who knew where the things’ vital centers were? Worst of all, it meant leaving the generator, all the precious energy-system in place.

  “If we lose, we lose it all,” he m
uttered. He sat down heavily on the tapes. The pain in his groin was much worse now. Bethel, he thought, I’ve left them a god in a box after all, if the generator’s smashed that’s all these tapes will be.

  The box held the poetry, the music, that had once been his life, back in another world. The life he had closed out; his own private meanings. Abandoned it gladly for the work of fathering his race. But after his accident he had asked Piet to lug these up here, telling the noion, “Now you will hear the music of men.” It had listened with him, often the whole night through, and sometimes there seemed to be a sharing. . . .

  He smiled, thinking of alien communion in the echoes of music from a brain centuries dead and light-years away. Below him in the bay he saw the last rocks were being offloaded into the apex cribs. All the young ones were out there now, lashing a huge hawser in the outer piles.

  Suddenly the sea-wall looked better to him. It was really very strong. The braces had gone in now, heavy trunks wedged slanting into the rock. Yes, it was a real fortress. Perhaps it would hold, perhaps everything would be all right.

  I am projecting my own doom, he thought wryly. His eyes cleared, he let himself savor the beauty of the scene. Good, it was good; the strong young people, his children with unshadowed eyes. . . . He had made it, he had led them here out of tyranny and terror, he had planted them and built the complex living thing, the colony. They had come through. If there was one more danger, he had one last trick left to help them. Yes; even with his death he could help them one more time, make it all right. What more could a man ask, he wondered, smiling, all calm strength to the bottom of his being, now, all one. . . .

  —And the sky fell in, the bottom of his being betrayed him with the memory that he would not remember. What more could a man want? He groaned, clenched his eyes.

  . . . In the spring, it had begun. In the idle days after the planting was in. He and his eldest son, the young giant whose head he had once thrust into a bag, had made an exploration voyage.

  A query had been in the back of his mind since Day One, the day the ship landed. In the last tumultuous minutes there had been a glimpse of another clearing, a white scar on the far south coast. A good site, perhaps, for a future settlement? And so he and Piet had taken the catamaran south to look.